How the Orient Express Got a Hollywood Makeover

It’s one of the most iconic trains in the world, and Belmond's Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is back in the spotlight thanks to a 21st-century take on Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie's 1934 novel. But producers and designers had to take certain liberties with the train, which runs with two cars from the original Orient Express, to make it work on screen. The first? Build working replicas of the train for filming.

If you’ve booked a trip on the real Belmond train, you unfortunately won’t be walking the same halls as Kenneth Branagh, Judy Dench, Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Instead, production designer Jim Clay built a 33-ton replica of the train for filming, at Longcross Studios in Surrey, about an hour west of London.

"We took a rather luxurious research trip with Ken Branagh, Haris [Zambarloukos], the director of photography, and the team, boarding in Paris and riding overnight through the Alps, arriving the next morning in Venice. We wanted to see what it was like and it really was fantastic, we were blown away by the kind of luxury and opulence," Clay told Condé Nast Traveler. "We went to be sure that we could bring the true atmosphere to the set."

But while the train ride proved to be the ultimate work trip, the team behind the movie quickly realized that filming on the train itself came with too many restrictions, since the space left little room for the large 65mm cameras, dolly tracks, and steady-cam equipment to move around.

Clay and his team built nearly the whole set (including a full-scale replica of Istanbul's fictional Stamboul Station, inspired by city’s real Sirkeci Station, inside a large sound stage) so that they could have complete control over the design and filming opportunities. But tight train corridors and cramped rooms weren’t the only reason the team decided to build out the set at Longcross.

“I've worked with trains before,” Branagh, who both acted in and directed the movie, said in a release. “And it just takes so much longer to be up a real mountain in Switzerland—stopping the train, sending it back, with one track, and fifty other trains with real passengers on them waiting to get past—than it is to ambitiously but excitingly build Stamboul Station at Longcross.”

Michelle Pfeiffer on set in Murder on the Orient Express.

Photo by Nicola Dove

Plus, the train you see in the film, which premieres in theaters on November 10, doesn’t have the exact design features as on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.

"The original Belmond train is in a more floral, art nouveau style, with patterned curtains and things. We decided to simplify the style to a more Art Deco, geometric style, so we weren’t fighting with costumes and hairdos and having a curtain's flower sprout from someone's head. We wanted to still have a sense of luxury without calling attention to the finishings of the carriage," Clay said. "We wanted the stars to be the real stars."

While most of the film was made in the former Ministry of Defense tank testing site turned movie studio, the team took two jaunts overseas. Branagh, as Inspector Poirot, headed to Malta to film the opening scenes set in Jerusalem. And Zambarloukos, the movie’s director of photography, traveled a little further to New Zealand, to record the footage you see out of the train’s windows.

The footage was then digitally stitched together and played on screens on the sound stage so the actors, too, felt like they were truly on a moving train.

"Even on the stationed train, it felt like we're in motion, and that does a lot for you as an actor because you don't have to imagine much," Josh Gad, who plays Hector McQueen, said in a release.

Actor and Broadway star Leslie Odom Jr. echoed Gad’s appreciation: "When you’re dealing with people who you know are caring about every napkin and window pane and all the linen on the table and every piece of china, it feels like time travel every time you step onto set.”